Setting up ControlLogix redundancy with ENBT modules in the local

chassis
Starting with the V11.7x versions of ControlLogix redundancy, you can now place 1756-ENBT
modules in the local redundant controller chassis. You are limited to five communications
modules total (either 1756-CNB, 1756-CNBR, or 1756-ENBT), and only up to two of those
communications modules can be 1756-ENBT’s. The ENBT’s are only intended for
communications to HMI’s; you cannot use the local ENBT support for use with Ethernet I/O with
ControlLogix redundancy.

Communication with the local ENBT’s from your HMI will be different than using ControlNet.
With ControlNet, we are able to transparently swap ControlNet addresses on switchover such that
the HMI needs to know nothing about redundancy. When a switchover occurs, the HMI just
continues communicating with the new primary controller over the same exact communication
path it was using before the switchover. Even the optimized packets with RSLinx are duplicated
on the secondary controller, so communications with the HMI after a switchover continues
immediately.

With Ethernet, the situation is different. The ENBT modules in the primary and secondary
chassis will have different IP addresses. Therefore, the communication path between the HMI
and the controller will change when a switchover occurs. In order to support this changing
communication path, you will use a feature in RSLinx called Alias Topics. An Alias Topic
allows you to define two OPC topics, one for each redundant controller, and then an Alias Topic
which will switch between the two OPC topics. Your HMI will always receive its OPC data from
the Alias Topic. The Alias Topic will then switch between the OPC topic for the controller in
chassis A or the controller in chassis B. Please note that when a switchover occurs, it may take a
few seconds for RSLinx to rebuild all of the optimized communication packets with the new
primary controller. With Ethernet, unlike ControlNet, these optimized packets cannot be
duplicated on the secondary controller since the path to the HMI will change on a switchover.

The last piece needed to make this work is something to tell RSLinx when to switch the Alias
Topic to use the correct topic which points at the primary controller. Starting with the V11.7x
redundancy release, we are supplying a Windows application called the ControlLogix
Redundancy Alias Topic Switcher which will automatically monitor the status of the redundant
controller chassis and make sure that the RSLinx Alias Topic is always pointing at the correct
controller. This is shown in the diagram below:

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 ControlLogix
Redundancy Alias
Chassis A Topic Switcher
Application

RSLinx
Topic “Chassis_B” Topic “Chassis_A”

Alias Topic

Chassis B

HMI
Application

To start setting up your system to use the ENBT modules, you must first create a driver in
RSLinx. Start RSLinx and select Configure Drivers… from Communications on the main menu.

From the Configure Drivers dialog, select Ethernet devices and click on Add New…

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Choose a name for your driver and click on OK.

From the Configure driver dialog, type in the IP addresses of the ENBT modules in the redundant
controller chassis. You should have two entries, one for the ENBT module in Chassis A and one
for the ENBT module in Chassis B. You can select Add New to add a new entry. Once you have
both IP addresses entered, select OK.

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If you browse in RSWho, you should now be able to see the ENBT modules in chassis A and
chassis B:

From RSWho, we will now create the OPC topics pointing at the controllers in chassis A and
chassis B. To do this, browse to the controller in chassis A, right click on it, and select Configure
New DDE/OPC Topic:

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Rename the topic to whatever name you want to use for the controller in Chassis A. In this
example, we named the topic L55_ChassisA. Select Done when you have renamed the topic.

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Repeat the above steps to create a topic for the controller in Chassis B. Here you can see we now
have two topics: L55_ChassisA and L55_ChassisB.

From the main menu in RSLinx, now select DDE/OPC Æ Alias Topic Configuration… :

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From the Configure Alias Topics dialog, select New and enter the name you want to use for the
Alias Topic which will represent this pair of redundant controllers. In this example, we named
the Alias Topic ‘RedundantSystem1.’

Now select L55_ChassisA and L55_ChassisB (or the two topic names you used) from the list of
Available Topics and select Add -> to move them to the list of Aliased Topics. Also make sure
that only ‘Switch on command’ is selected in the checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog. Then
select Save to save your changes.

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You should now install the ControlLogix Redundancy Alias Topic Switcher. Remember, this is
only required to support ENBT modules in the local redundant chassis. If your HMI’s are
communicating over ControlNet, this utility is not necessary since you will not need to use
RSLinx Alias Topics.

To install the Alias Topic Switcher, double click on the file, “ControlLogix Redundancy Alias
Topic Switcher.exe”. Once installation is complete, The Alias Topic Switcher should be installed
as a service, and you should see the Alias Topic Switcher icon in the Windows system tray in the
lower right corner of your screen:

If you hover your cursor over this icon, it will identify itself as “Redundancy Switch.”

Now right click on the icon and select Open Alias Topic Switching Tool to start configuring it.

The main Alias Topic Switcher dialog will appear as shown below. Click on Add New to add an
Alias Topic for the Switcher to start monitoring.

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In the Alias Topic Configuration dialog, enter the names of the RSLinx Alias Topic and the OPC
topics for chassis A and B you configured earlier and select OK when you are done. It may help
to go to RSLinx and bring up the Configure Alias Topics dialog in RSLinx to make sure you
enter the names correctly.

Once you select OK, the Alias Topic information you entered should show on the main Alias
Topic Switcher dialog as shown below. Notice that the Active Topic column now shows the
OPC topic currently being used by the Alias Topic. If you are connected to your controllers and
have everything configured correctly, this should be the primary chassis (L55_ChassisA in this
example).

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Now let’s test a switchover. Bring up RSLinx and use RSWho to browse to the 1757-SRM in
either the primary or secondary chassis. Right click on the SRM and select Module
Configuration…

From the 1757-Redundancy Module dialog, select the Synchronization tab and click on Initiate
Switchover. This will cause a switchover to the other chassis to occur.

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Now look at the Alias Topic Switcher again. It should show that the Active Topic is now the
topic pointing to the processor in the other chassis (L55_ChassisB in our example).

You can now use your Alias Topic to address data from your HMI application. As an example,
we could create a tag in RSViewSE which points at a pre-defined RSLinx item called
ActiveTopic. This will return a string with the name of the topic in use by the Alias Topic. In
RSViewSE, this tag configuration would look like this:

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As you can see, the topic name used in the Address of the tag is the Alias Topic name of
RedundantSystem1.

Now let’s create a graphic and animate an object with a tag from our redundant controllers. For
this example, we will display the ActiveTopic and do a fill animation of a bargraph. To display
the ActiveTopic, just reference the ActiveTopic tag we created above:

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For the fill of a rectangular bar, you can either type in the name of the alias topic and controller
tag you want, or you can browse into the controller to select the tag and then change the
controller’s topic name to the alias topic name. To do this, select Tag… from the Fill Animation
dialog

In the Tag Browser dialog, for this example, you could select the counter accumulator value from
a counter in the controller program. Notice that we browsed into the controller represented by the
L55_ChassisA topic.

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The expression entry in the Fill Animation dialog will now show the controller tag we just
selected from the Tag Browser.

Now we just need to change the topic name from [L55_ChassisA] to [RedundantSystem1] since
we want all our HMI tag references to use the Alias Topic.

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If we now test run our graphic, the ActiveTopic field will display the current topic in use by the
Alias Topic, and the vertical bar will fill according to the counter accumulator we referenced. If
we perform a switchover, the graphic will continue to update since all of the tags point to the
Alias Topic.

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So by using Alias Topics and the ControlLogix Redundancy Alias Topic Switcher, your HMI’s
can transparently continue operating through a switchover when communicating through ENBT
modules in the redundant controller chassis.

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